Does no-one use roof ladders any more? I want the gutters in a very high building cleaned, and I'm told that a cherry-picker will have to be used, rental for a day costing around £1000.
20 years ago the roof was felted and re-laid by men just using roof-ladders. Has this method gone out of fashion?
The Work at Height Regulations 2005 now apply in any case where the height of working is such that a fall carries a risk of personal injury. While they do not prohibit the use of ladders, ladders are unlikely to meet the requirements for selecting work equipment in many cases.
Having said that, £1000 a day sounds a lot for a cherry picker.
Colin Bignell
How DIY are you prepared to go?
Once I had a rope in place I was happy up a ladder. Not before that though, and getting the rope in place was not as easy as I'd hoped - and for a properly high building this will obviously be worse. Though all the properly high buildings I've used have access out of the top, at which point you abseil into gutter-cleaning position.
Obviously this doesn't help if you're not comfortable with ropes and harnesses, ie climber/caver or similar.
In article , Timothy Murphy writes
Roped access is becoming more popular for this sort of thing. If you are in or near a decent sized city then there should be teams doing this sort of thing already. For a conventional tiled roof the worker can toddle along the edge doing the clearing work while the rope man stops a slip from escalating. For a slate roof it might be a bit more problematic and I've seen a cherry picker used to avoid risk of damage to the slates.
Sounds like someone's taking the michael. Cherry pickers dont cost anything like that, and it should be possible to find an imported self employed window cleaner that wants the work.
For far less you cuold buy yourself a looj gutter cleaning robot, or an RC toy helicopter.
NT
Well half the people that used to work like that are now in wheelchairs, the other half are dead.
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When I looked a few years ago charges for small powered or unpowered platforms which would allow access to gutters, windows made erected scaffolding a cheaper alternatives for anything over 2/3 days hire. I always wondered why builders etc bothered getting scaffolding erected for a 1/2 day job and why I never saw platforms, cherry pickers etc being used.
Have you used a Looj? I've thought about that in the past, but have read both good and bad reviews of the device.
Also, I'm not sure how easy it would be to use the robot in my case. The gutters are about 60ft high. (The building is part of a 4-storey Victorian orphanage.) It is easy enough to get through a skylight onto the slate roof, and it might be possible to slide the robot down the slates to the gutter. But it seems to me the robot could easily get stuck in the gutter, and it would be very difficult to retrieve it.
Thanks for the suggestion, but that is definitely not my metier! I'm frightened of falling out of bed.
designed to allow the orpahans to clean the gutters...
Abseiling is the easiest answer then, possibly with something to spread the load on the roof (tied on ladder?)
Though having just seen your mention of your thoughts on heights, I'll let you ignore that :-)
Why would they need roof ladders for cleaning gutters?
Just ladders might well be OK depending on the height
Not when cherry pickers are so cheap 8-)
I had a recent quote from HSS (who aren't cheap) for a new model which had a better sideways reach than previous models that were car trailerable (There's a conservatory in the way of using ladders). =A3200 for a w/e, =A3300 for a week.
What's wrong with a water blaster hose tied to a long pole? Put a video camera on the end if you have one.
Not in Dublin they don't! (Although I /think/ there is an EU directive which the Regulations implement, so there will be something similar in Dublin).
Assuming your "water blaster" is a jet washer like mine, the water jet's reaction would propel such a pole uncontrollably, much the the amusement of bystanders. Even a metre of lance extension needs two hands to stop it moving sideways.
Never underestimate the power of a water jet coming from a jet washer and never practice up a ladder...
You should tie the jet blaster to the pole in an inverted U shape, so that it blasts *down* into the gutter, that way the sideways thrust which the jet exerts upon the pole is minimised.
Two jets in opposition, then. Or possibly two at 45=B0 from vertical so=20 you blast both ways - as it were.
--=20 Skipweasel - never knowingly understood.
How tall was that one? The OP wants to reach sixty feet up, and an undisclosed distance sideways. I doubt we're talking about one you could tow behind a car. The ones that size that I've seen come on a seven and a half tonner chassis.
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